Abbasid Caliphate: al-Hadi (169-170AH / 785-786CE) AR dirham, al-Muhammadiya

[Quant.Geek]

Abbasid Caliphate: Abu Muhammad Musa al-Hadi ibn al-Mahdi (169-170AH / 785-786CE) AR dirham, al-Muhammadiya (Album-217.2; Lowick-1666; NHR-70A)

Obverse Field:
لا اله الا الله وحده لا شرك له
There is no deity except (the one) God alone. He has no equal

Obverse Margin:
بسم الله ضرب هذا الدرهم بالمحمدية سنة سبعين و مئة
In the name of God. This dirham was struck in Muhammadiya in the year seventy and one hundred

Reverse Field:
محمد رسول الله صلى الله عليه و سلم الخليفة الهادى
Muhammad is the messenger of Allah, peace be upon him. Caliph al-Hadi
بر below

Reverse Margin:
محمد رسول الله ارسله بالهدى و دين الحق ليظهره على الدين كله ولو كره المشركون
He sent him with guidance and the true religion to reveal it to all religions even if the polytheists abhor it.

A high-resolution image of this coin is available at FORVM Ancient Coins

[THCoins]

Great coin, and great practice material for me ! You are way ahead of me in transcribing these, the Arabic script still poses some problems to me  .

[Quant.Geek]

Arabic is somewhat easy as there is always someone you can reach out for help.  Furthermore, there are already a few good sites that have done some transcribing of these coins and that helps immensely.  The problem I have been facing the past few days is Mongolian!!!  I have been struggling to finish off transcribing one Ilkhanid coin as I am having font issues as well as a difficult transcription.  To make matters worse, the script is written top to bottom and unicode lays the characters out left to right and it needs to be rotated clockwise (similar to Phags-Pa).  The coin has the legends written right to left and hence you rotate it counterclockwise!

[sobris]

The mint al-Muhammadiya is problematic as it refers to two different places. Michael L. Bates
has written about this in Journal of the ONS 209, pp 14-17. The title of the article is: "A Second
Muhammadiya, and the four Mints of the Bajunays Mine". The "ordinary" Muhammadiya is equal
to al-Rayy (outside Tehran) and the one described by Bates is Harun Abad/al-Haruniya/
al-Muhammadiya/Ma'din Bajunays in Armenia.

This coin comes clear from the confusion by only one year, as 171 is the first year where there
are coins from the "second" Muhammadiya.....